Readers Guide: Tom Wolfe’s latest ‘Back to Blood’ at Library

Thursday

Nov 29, 2012 at 9:09 PMNov 29, 2012 at 9:11 PM

At the age of 81, Tom Wolfe shows he still has what it takes in “Back to Blood.” Like “Bonfires of the Vanities” and “A Man in Full,” Wolfe focuses his lens on a city — Miami this time — to present a colorful mosaic of life and culture in an American town uneasily dominated by Cubans and Blacks and where White Anglo Saxon Protestants are a minority. And like his previous novels, Wolfe populates his book with a full cast of characters who represent all walks of life — including Nestor Comacho, a cop of Cuban descent, who walks a difficult line between the citizens he serves and his Anglo superiors.

by Susie Stooksbury

At the age of 81, Tom Wolfe shows he still has what it takes in “Back to Blood.” Like “Bonfires of the Vanities” and “A Man in Full,” Wolfe focuses his lens on a city — Miami this time — to present a colorful mosaic of life and culture in an American town uneasily dominated by Cubans and Blacks and where White Anglo Saxon Protestants are a minority. And like his previous novels, Wolfe populates his book with a full cast of characters who represent all walks of life — including Nestor Comacho, a cop of Cuban descent, who walks a difficult line between the citizens he serves and his Anglo superiors.

Over the years, Barbara Kingsolver has created well-written, thought-provoking novels that do more than tell a good story. In “Flight Behavior,” she uses the mass migration of monarch butterflies to the hills of Tennessee as the backdrop for one woman's self-discovery. Dellarobia Turnbow lost her chance for a better life when she became pregnant at 17. Ten years and two children later, she is unhappily married and working hard on a failing farm. Grabbing at a few hours of happiness in an illicit tryst, she comes upon a field beautifully alive with butterflies — a phenomenon that will bring the world, and a whole lot of controversy, to little Feathertown.

Even for a country used to earthquakes and tsunamis, Japan was unprepared for the magnitude of the event that struck March 11, 2011. A 9.0 earthquake was quickly followed by an equally devastating tsunami which culminated in the meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. How did these people, whose resilience has seen them through years of disasters, survive this monumental event? Reporters Lucy Birmingham and David McNeill focus on six eyewitnesses, as well as their own experiences during the disaster, in “Strong in the Rain” (952.000).

Kurt Wallender is nowhere in sight in Henning Mankell's “The Shadow Girls.” Rather, our hero is Jesper Humlin, a poet of moderate success whose slender volumes don't seem to be selling as well as they once did. His editor has promised the publishing world that Jesper's next work will be a crime novel — even though the poet has no idea where or how to begin writing one. What intrigues him, though, are the stories of three young women — all refugees — who tell him the sordid details of their difficult lives.

Like many neurosurgeons, Dr. Eban Alexander scoffed at reports of Near Death Experiences. As a scientist, he believed such events were due to malfunctioning brain chemistry — nothing more. But when he somehow contracted a rare form of meningitis and slipped into a deep coma, he had a Near Death Experience, and when he awoke, he realized it had given him a new perspective on life and reality. He tells of his experience in “Proof of Heaven: a Neurosurgeon's Journey into the Afterlife” (133.900).

Superheroes are popular once again these days, thanks to the recent spate of movies featuring the characters from Marvel Comics. But there's a new superhero in town — one who received his powers from the long-ago atomic bomb tests in the desert. He is Radioactive Man, and as imagined by Matt Groening he looks a lot like Homer Simpson, except he is built like Superman and has a lightning bolt in his head. You can catch up on all his adventures in “Radioactive Man: Radioactive Repository Volume One” (741.500).